Our devs have put a lot of time, effort, and testing into Avast's Game Mode feature. It's focused on being easy to use and freeing up system resources while allowing Avast to continue to keep you fully protected.

What do you think? Would this be useful to you, are you already using it, etc.?

Side note: personally, I have used it also and it made a noticeable difference for me, although my angle was a bit different than the author of the post above - I use it on a lower powered laptop. Freeing up those resources and muting notifications/etc. seemed to help quite a bit in that case.

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I've seen this on a few AV solutions, though if the AV was light enough and smart enough to know huge packed files are being used for textures, maps et all and skipped them, I doubt this mode would be needed at all.

I've noticed the first time I run and quit a game, Avast asks me if I want to add it to the games list. I always click yes. Presumably it always opens in game mode from then on?

When I was 17 this is the sort of thing I'd spend a lot of time proactively setting up, now I just do the bare bones with my PC. If stuff like this isn't automated (sounds like it is though) I won't use it.

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My anti-malware software has a Gamer Mode and I disable it. The performance impact of properly-written anti-malware software is almost nil, and it should never impact gaming in a human-meaningful way, especially on modern computer systems. This might have been a problem a dozen years ago when most system were single-core, but on multi-core, multi-threaded operating systems with things like SSDs this is a non-issue.

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I've noticed the first time I run and quit a game, Avast asks me if I want to add it to the games list. I always click yes. Presumably it always opens in game mode from then on?

When I was 17 this is the sort of thing I'd spend a lot of time proactively setting up, now I just do the bare bones with my PC. If stuff like this isn't automated (sounds like it is though) I won't use it.

Yes, it should automatically detect the game and run it in Game Mode, if you have the feature enabled. You can turn it on and off per game, also.

Gorfmaster1 wrote:

I have a pretty decent machine for gaming, I don't really notice any decline from Avast on my machine, so I never felt a needed for the use of Game Mode.

This is great -- as others have mentioned here the performance impact from Avast is already very low (an important factor for our developers) so I think the most difference would be noticed by either the most hardcore gamers, or the other end of the spectrum, lower spec machines that may benefit more from the changes.

mizzo wrote:

I don't game, but I do use game mode to silence notifications. I hope you don't think of that as a waste of all the time and effort you guys put into it!

Not at all, actually! We are very much aware that silent/gaming mode, or the specific Game Mode in Avast 2017, is commonly used to silence notifications in fullscreen apps. It's a big part of how the feature works and the benefit to the user. Although, the new Game Mode does more to improve performance (or remove barriers to performance) than the traditional "silent mode."

Also, Game Mode can be used for non-games. I have heard of some using it for high demand apps like video editing, image editing, etc. Anything can be added to Game Mode manually if desired.

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I have a pretty decent machine for gaming, I don't really notice any decline from Avast on my machine, so I never felt a needed for the use of Game Mode.

This is great -- as others have mentioned here the performance impact from Avast is already very low (an important factor for our developers) so I think the most difference would be noticed by either the most hardcore gamers, or the other end of the spectrum, lower spec machines that may benefit more from the changes.

That, to me, is one of the most important things we look at for our machines. For our Personal and Profesional machines, performance with an AV is what can decide what AV solution we go with.

I had played around with it in years past and didn't see a whole lot of difference, at least as far as I could tell at the time. Now my gaming is done in an isolated Win8.1 environment with nothing on it but games (critical files are on my Linux drives and Windows has no EXT4 driver, so can't see any of them) and so there's no AV software installed on that instance.

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i personally only run windows defender on both my laptop and my Gaming rig. but now this makes me wonder, are there any avast free options? cause i would love a trial or something to test it out see if it can keep me safe without the impact of more potent AV(at least more than windows defender)

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i personally only run windows defender on both my laptop and my Gaming rig. but now this makes me wonder, are there any avast free options? cause i would love a trial or something to test it out see if it can keep me safe without the impact of more potent AV(at least more than windows defender)